Heretic Queen (11 page)

While Dudley was exiled from court awaiting the outcome of the inquest into his wife's death, Francis II, king of France, breathed his last on December 5, 1560. He died of an abscess on the brain. Mary Queen of France was now merely Mary Queen of Scots, dowager queen of France. Her little brother-in-law, Maximilien-Charles, became Charles IX. Catherine de' Medici proclaimed herself regent with the blessing of the king of Navarre, since she had agreed to return Navarre's younger brother Condé to him unharmed. The reign of terror of the Guise brothers was, so Catherine believed, at an end.

Mary was just eighteen, a former queen of the only country she could remember and the unwanted queen of the Protestant country of her birth. She had two obvious choices ahead of her: to remain in quiet retreat in France for the rest of her days or return to Scotland. Despite trying to create a third choice—marrying the imbecile and dangerous son and heir of Philip II—Scotland beckoned loudly. Mary's natural half brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, had come to France ostensibly on behalf of the Protestant Lords to discuss what might happen if Mary chose to return to Scotland.

Unbeknown to him, one tidbit of gossip he conveyed from the English court would determine that Mary must return home: Catherine Grey, the putative heir from the English Suffolk line to the succession, had married the Earl of Hertford in secret, and she was expecting their first child. Moray elaborated that Elizabeth, outraged that her semiofficial heir should marry without royal consent, had ordered Catherine and Hertford sent to the Tower until further notice.
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This made any indecision Mary might have felt evaporate. If Mary wanted to claim the throne of England, she would need to visit her cousin Elizabeth and charm her, just as she had done with everyone she met. Mary resolved to come to England to prove that she was not only the rightful heir to the throne but also a most fitting one.

 

FIVE

The Battle for Hearts and Minds

For this is man's nature, that where he is persuaded that there is the power to bring prosperity and adversity, there will he worship.

—
George Gifford,
A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers

If Elizabeth understood one thing above all else, it was that both she and England were in mortal danger. The apparently innocent appeal of the young Queen Mary to return to Scotland through England seemed to be the most natural and innocuous of requests, but Elizabeth, despite pressure from nearly all her councillors, was not budging. For her, to have the very queen who refused to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh travel the length and breadth of England with her mostly French royal train was a threat she simply was not prepared to take. To have the Scots queen charm England with her beauty, her youth, her French courtly ways, and her silver tongue rankled in every fiber of Elizabeth's body. Eventually Cecil was compelled to write that Her Majesty could “in no wise consent … Why should the Queen show any such courtesy considering she [Mary] hath not kept promise in any one thing but always said well and done nothing?”
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Even had Mary not been a serial breaker of promises, to allow a Catholic queen to travel unchecked among an English population who had not necessarily declared itself either in favor of or against the Elizabethan religious settlement was simply too great a risk.

To make matters worse, Elizabeth saw plots and counterplots within her own nobility and among her councillors. The Suffolk heir to the throne, Lady Catherine Grey, never a favorite of Elizabeth, had been suspected for some while of allowing herself to become embroiled in Spanish plots to overthrow her. In fact, the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip, “I try to keep Lady Catherine very friendly,” as early as November 1559. “And she has promised me,” Ambassador de Feria reported, “not to change her religion, nor marry without my consent.”
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Alas, Catherine Grey did not keep de Feria and his successor, Alvarez de Quadra, informed of her crucial decisions in matters of either religion or the heart. To compound her offenses when they were discovered, she had even managed to foil Elizabeth's own plan to marry her off to Scotland's Earl of Arran in 1560. The queen had opened negotiations with the Scots Lords of the Congregation in the hope of uniting Scotland and England on Elizabeth's own death by marrying the two rival claimant lines to England's throne.
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Instead, after a clandestine courtship, Catherine Grey married Edward, Earl of Hertford, son of the disgraced Lord Protector Seymour from the reign of Edward VI. To the Elizabethan mind, “the purpose of the toils and perils of lovers should have as their principal aim the conquest of a woman's soul rather than her body.”
4
As a queen who had declared that her woman's body was quite separate from the body politic over the Dudley affair, Elizabeth read her own mortal peril into Catherine's marriage to Hertford.

Elizabeth was incandescent. Hertford had escaped to France months earlier, most likely in fear of what would happen once it was discovered that his wife was “with child.” When Catherine was eight months pregnant, she was thrown unceremoniously into the Tower of London, where she soon gave birth to her son, Edward, named after his father. However, it would be wrong to think that Elizabeth's harshness to Catherine was just some petty act of vengeance against her putative heir.

Nagging uncomfortably at the back of the queen's mind was whether her nobility—or worse still, Cecil—had had a hand in the match. The Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, was of the opinion that Cecil had been behind Catherine's clandestine marriage and made no secret of his feelings to Elizabeth. Yet there were so many whispered intrigues surrounding Lady Catherine that the only sensible course of action from Elizabeth's viewpoint was to have the marriage to Hertford annulled by the archbishop of Canterbury and place Catherine in the Tower indefinitely.

*   *   *

Though the “Hertford Affair”
had happened months earlier, in Elizabeth's meeting with the Scots ambassador Maitland in September 1561 in London, she reiterated her fears about naming a successor: “So long as I live, I shall be Queen of England. When I am dead, they shall succeed me that have the most right … I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.
Plures adorant solem orientalem quam occidentalem
.”
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The Latin text holds the key to her thinking. It translates as
More worship the rising than the setting sun.
In this one phrase is encompassed all the scheming and plotting that surrounds a hopeful heir, whose youth, vigor, and vitality pose a threat to the reigning monarch. Elizabeth would never waver from this viewpoint and actually made it illegal to mention the succession in 1571. It seems incredible that her council and nobility refused to take her at her word on this absolutely fixed point.

Still, the succession mattered, not only to those at court but also to the people at large. They were being asked to accept rapid changes thrust upon them by the Act of Settlement and Uniformity in religious matters, where the monarch reigned supreme over church as well as state. This meant, of course, that the monarch affected each and every life with her whims and fancies and demanded her subjects' utter loyalty. Loyalty, however, depended in large part on the individual's religious convictions, status in society, and geographical location.

*   *   *

The nobles were fairly
easy for Elizabeth to comprehend, just as it was reasonable to expect them to accept whatever the queen decided. It was, after all, the way of life at court. Though the Tudors were noted for their recognition of service by merit—often rewarding the Tudor “new men”—their nobility represented only a very small fraction of society. Many followed Elizabeth's itinerant court between her palaces. The queen knew full well that they all sought preferment and that their oaths of allegiance tripped as easily off the tongue as silent conspiracies could be hatched. They simply needed watching, and Cecil had already made a start on what would become the longest surviving of the Elizabethan secret services, with many eyes and ears strategically placed to pick up the slightest whiff of a plot against her.

The English merchant classes were another matter entirely. Most of the royal palaces were situated in and around London, which increased trade significantly in the capital and helped maintain it as the realm's largest city, with the Thames as its major thoroughfare.
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City life created new opportunities for advancement either at court or in trade, but London remained rife with disease and criminality. Even the Puritan “godly” worshipping at St. Paul's were not immune from the sacrilegious goings-on within its walls. In 1561, “the south alley” so scandalized a provincial bishop that he wrote home that it “is used for popery and usury, the north for simony, and the horse fair in the midst for all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawling, murders, conspiracies, and the font for ordinary payment of money, as well known to all men as the beggar knows his bush.”
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The foremost house of prayer in the City was a house of worship as much as it was a den of iniquity and home to booksellers touting clandestine censored books as well as ballads, pamphlets, and holy hymn sheets licensed by the Stationer's Register.

Though still a walled city, London had long before spilled out beyond its protective gates: to the north, east, and west were Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate, and Aldgate, with the royal palace of the Tower of London to the south, bordering the Thames. When the Bow Bell sounded, the gates creaked shut and the bellmen set out on their patrol, calling out the hour with the warning:

Remember the clocks,

Look well to your locks,

Fire and your light,

And God give you good night

For now the bell ringeth.
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Yet most English men and women lived in the countryside, the bulk of them yeomanry or peasants. Most of them were removed from much of the hurly-burly of England's larger regional cities. They lived according to the agrarian calendar, often buffeted by the winds. Their country traditions had long been muddled between pagan ritual and ecclesiastical rite, with saints' days rather than the day and the month holding more meaning to the average Elizabethan. “St. Hilarytide” meant January 13, just as “St. Georgetide” indicated April 23. “Whitsuntide” was both a pagan holiday and the festival commemorating the mystery of Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Ghost, and while it remained a solemn celebration for the religious, Whit Sunday, fifty days after Easter, was also a time of community merrymaking and feasts for reveling, with Whitsun church cakes and ales served.

Though outlawed with the Elizabethan religious settlement, telling the time of year by saints' days remained the common practice. Days that were pagan in origin, like Midsummer Day, sometimes called St. John's Day, on June 24, had been masquerading as holy days for over a millennium. In Elizabeth's England, they came under government scrutiny as an unacceptably pagan solar festival in Romish disguise. Barnaby Googe attacked the St. John's Day festivities of “bonfires and floral garlands … as popish relics.”
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Ecclesiastical holy days—or red-letter days in the calendar—were struck off at a stroke with the Elizabethan settlement, with the result that the days off from work were reduced by nearly half. “Our holy and festival days,” according to the Elizabethan chronicler and country parson William Harrison, “we had under the Pope four score and fifteen called festival, and thirty
profesti
[minor festivals], beside the Sundays, they are all brought unto seven and twenty; and with them the superfluous numbers of idle wakes, guilds, fraternities, church ales, help ales, and soul ales, called also dirge ales, with the heathenish rioting at bride ales, are well diminished and laid aside.”
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All too soon, the preferred country way of celebrating just about anything in the calendar with cakes and ale would become abhorrent to the new Protestant pious, as Shakespeare's memorable line in
Twelfth Night
reminds us: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
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In some parishes, maypoles were relegated to an ignominious reuse as parish ladders. Garlands remained unpicked in the meadows. Still, despite official censure of the custom of merrymaking with cakes and ale, as well as loud fireworks (the louder the better) and bonfires, these would remain steadfast features of country life, just as the hills and valleys remained constant in the landscape.

Along with the country ways went magic and superstition. The English read their weather from the behavior of the animals, from the turning color of the leaves, and from the skies and stars. Astrology was a booming trade, with local astrologers charging their townspeople as much as a shilling to foretell where a lost cow or mare had strayed off to. Everyone looked to the stars to help decipher the uncertain future, and many believed in a harmonious “music of the spheres” where, unlike in Shakespeare's
Hamlet,
the time was
not
out of joint.
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For the average Elizabethan, if there was discord in the planets, life on earth would become most distinctly “out of joint.”

*   *   *

All these long-held
belief systems did not sit easily with the new religion Elizabeth sought to give her people. Though outwardly everything seemed to be the same, within the church, life was different. Vicars and bishops inveighed against the seasonal rituals and feasts as heathen practices, spawned by the bishop of Rome, the Antichrist. Papists, as the Roman Catholics were called by the Tudor Protestants throughout Elizabeth's reign, blamed the age-old pagan customs for the poor morals of the people. “I never commanded,” preached William Keth from his parish pulpit in Dorset, “your candles at Candlemas, your popish penance on Ash Wednesday, your eggs and bacon on Good Friday, your gospels at superstitious crosses decked like idols, your fires at Midsummer, and your ringing [of church bells] at Hallowtide for all Christian souls.”
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